The Internet has emerged as a communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of applications. Businesses and consumers connect their routers to the Internet for sending and receiving data packets. Large businesses often have multiple users in geographically separated locations interconnected either through a service provider's network or the Internet. For example, a large business or enterprise customer may have a communications solution that includes multiple local area networks attached to the Internet or to a service provider's network. The users connect their end devices such as computers and routers to the local area network. The business customers have options to either manage the infrastructure at each location by themselves, or let the service provider manage the network and the associated infrastructures at a cost. The business customers often have neither the network expertise nor the information to properly evaluate the total cost of operating a network infrastructure. Thus, the business customers will often request the service provider to assist in evaluating various options, e.g., to provide a cost estimate for managing the customer's network infrastructure by the service provider. However, modeling of the customers' infrastructure is laborious, time consuming, and costly and would require software driven computer tools. However, changing the underlying business rules requires changes in a hard-coded program and is often cost prohibitive.
Therefore there is a need for a flexible rule-based method to evaluate the cost of operating a network infrastructure.